Abstract
The World Bank considers itself as “a leader in piloting payments for ecosystem services”. This article explores how the World Bank gradually integrated environmental and legal issues within its strategic framework with a particular focus on its economic theoretical influences.In the early 1990s, the New Institutional Economics became the main influence concerning the analysis of institutional arrangements and legal issues. We distinguish between different branches within the NIE. One remained very close to the mainstream or orthodox economics and tended to focus on private property rights as the central legal issue. We demonstrate that this branch fitted with both the market-friendly policies supported by the WB, and with the theoretical and statistical tools used by the WB's economists. It induced a very specific analysis of legal and institutional issues. It also involved a kind of theoretical path dependency, which influenced a market-oriented analysis of ecosystem services and impoverished the institutional and legal debates concerning the WB's environmental strategy.We suggest that the other branch of the NIE, as developed by the Bloomington School, offered another framework to tackle environmental issues regarding the diversity of institutional and legal arrangements.We conclude on the ambiguous use of economic theory for addressing environmental and legal issues.
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